I have a piece about Medicare spending today on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan investigative journalism organization. It’s the setup for an investigative series that will look at where Medicare is spending its money, and my piece looks at why we should care. (Answer: because its costs are going up so fast that we’re not going to be able to afford it.)
It’s very hard to write a story like this without sounding like an anti-Medicare screed. I’m hoping the piece strikes the right balance, and that readers will get the point: Medicare has saved millions of people from hardship, it has to continue, but it can’t go on the way it’s going. Some of the issues are unique to Medicare, but for the most part, spending is rising too much for the same reasons all health care spending is rising too much.
Of course, bringing down spending in the right way — cutting out the fat, without hurting people along the way — is the biggest challenge of our time. The book covers the changes that the new law will make to Medicare (Chapter 9) and some of the experiments that will try to bring down health care costs (Chapter 14), but this piece should tie some of those themes together and explain why we’ll all have to have a grown-up conversation about what we can and can’t afford.
Take a look and let me know what you think. Nicely, of course.
